TL;DR
Accounting software firm Xero put questions to 520 senior figures at independent British bookkeeping and accountancy practices, and found that firms running AI inside daily workflows recover 7.1 hours a week on average, rising to 10.6 hours at the best-performing firms. Only 5% expect the technology to reduce their headcount over the coming year. Three in five are redirecting the freed time into advisory services.
Process discipline, not tooling
The most useful finding in Xero’s Modern Practice Playbook is not the hours saved but what separates the firms saving them. Among practices using AI daily, 87% keep documented and regularly maintained processes. Among those with no adoption plans, that figure collapses to 18%.
That gap points somewhere uncomfortable for vendors: the constraint on getting value out of these tools is procedural maturity, not software licensing. A practice that cannot describe how a job currently moves through it has nothing for an assistant to accelerate.
The annualised savings figures need reading carefully. Xero puts them at roughly £198,000 ($268,000) for a typical practice and about £175,000 ($237,000) for top performers — the latter being smaller in cash terms despite the greater hours saved, because the totals cover a whole workforce and therefore track firm size rather than per-person efficiency.
Where the time goes
Advisory work is the destination, and it is also the highest-margin service these firms offer, at 51%. That is a different story from the one usually attached to professional-services automation: capacity is being moved up the value chain rather than removed.
Hiring is shifting to match. Nearly two-thirds of firms have changed the skills they recruit for, favouring relationship management and technology fluency, while the strongest performers are close to twice as likely to bring in data analysts or tax technologists. On pricing, two in five practices charging by value rather than by hour report better profitability.
Xero classed top-performing employing firms as those clearing net margins of 41% or above. Fieldwork ran from 7 to 26 May 2026.
Looking forward
Set this against the ILO’s warning that middle-skill roles are thinning, and the picture for UK practices sharpens. Nobody here is planning redundancies, but a profession that hires for relationship skills and data specialism is not hiring for the same entry-level ledger work it once did.
The caution worth carrying is accuracy. Reporting through this year has repeatedly found AI-generated errors surfacing in professional-services output, and advisory work carries more client risk than the compliance tasks being automated. Recovered hours only pay if the output survives review.